breaking pitches are hot
oh my christ, this story is so messed up. i wrote it in the same long couple of nights that also produced 'el rey' and a few others that have been consigned to the graveyard. that is to say, i wrote it while so high on speed i could barely keep my hands on the keys.
this story is SO MESSED UP.
Mark Mulder spends the last three weeks of the season waiting for Tim Hudson to throw a splitter. No such luck, though.
There are piles of shredded Gatorade cups around Mulder’s spikes, little green and orange mountains, fat lightning bolts. The waxy white stuff from the inside of the cups is all under his nails and it’s gonna drive him crazy.
Mulder’s not sure, but he thinks the guys are avoiding him. He’s got a good four feet of bench to either side of him, room for his arms to stretch all the way out, but nobody sits down. Zito and Byrnes are on the steps by the helmets, and Chavez keeps poking them with a bat to get them out of the way. Harden and Crosby are talking very loudly about the best places to go snowboarding in Northern California. Melhuse and Miller are making some kind of diagram on yellow paper, pencil lead smearing on the side of Miller’s hand, and Kotsay is sitting on the shelf above the bench, watching them with a staggeringly bored expression on his face.
Everybody looks awkwardly positioned, perched and balanced and Zito’s high-pitched giggle making Mulder’s head hurt. They’re sitting on the steps and the shelf and leaning on the rail, but no one comes by to sit next to Mulder.
Hatteberg strikes out, and the fielders head back out. Mulder thinks, ‘whatever,’ because this isn’t, like, third grade where if you don’t eat lunch at the cool kids’ table, nobody will come to your birthday party. He wonders for a little while about who on the team ate at the cool kids’ table.
He watches Hudson warming up. Nothing diving, nothing with a trapdoor at the tail of it or a suicidal pilot in the cockpit. Sometimes Mulder can’t tell the split from the slider, his angle being what it is. Hudson can throw this weird slower splitter, and it takes most of the afternoon to get to the plate, and then drops so fast it’s like it just stopped dead and gravity took over. Hudson doesn’t throw it much. It’s a fucker to control.
Zito comes over and sits beside him, nudging Mulder’s shoe until Mulder makes an irritated noise to acknowledge him, and kicks Zito in the ankle.
“Hey, fuckin’ ow. Dude, uncool.” Zito scowls, leans over to rub his ankle, his forehead all crinkled up and his lower lip slightly pushed out. The whole injured puppy thing has never worked on Mulder. You’d think Zito would have realized by now.
Mulder watches Hudson for a little while longer, ignoring Zito. Two-seam. Two-seam. Change. Slider, and now there are two strikes and Mulder is imploring under his breath, “Just fucking throw it, man, c’mon.”
Zito pours half a bag of sunflower seeds into his mouth and squints at Mulder with his head still tipped way back. “Are you talking to yourself again?” he asks, nearly incoherent through the mouthful of seeds, white-gray shells stuck to his lip and chin, his fingers dusted with thin salt.
Mulder casually moves a few inches down the bench away from Zito. “He hasn’t been throwing any splitters. Like, not for weeks now.”
Zito narrows his eyes as if he’s looking into the sun, though there’s an overhang and Zito’s crazy. He studies Hudson, a flash of white in the middle of the green, looking like a brushstroke, modern art or something. Hudson is trying to light Miller on fire with his eyes, and spitting dryly off to the side.
“Could be he doesn’t have control of it,” Zito offers.
Mulder snorts. “You know we’re talking about Huddy, not you, right?”
“Fuck, I thought we were talking about you.”
Mulder tries to glare like Hudson, but he’s no good at it. Zito just grins, sunflower shells in his teeth, his tongue fishing back by his molars and poking out his cheek. Mulder wants to take a picture of Zito right now, with his eyes almost crossed from concentrating so hard, and blow it up to poster-size. Give them away as free gifts to all the swallow-your-tongue hot girls who come to the park in baby doll tees and tank-tops with Zito’s name all over everything. Apparently, they think Zito’s ‘sensitive.’
Zito doesn’t look particularly sensitive. Mulder inspects him covertly, out the corner of his eye. Zito’s got a finger shoved way back in his mouth now, epic struggle between man and sunflower seed shell. Mulder would put five bucks on the shell, but who the hell would take him up on that action?
Zito’s face is scrunched up, one eye all the way closed. Mulder can see the silver glints of Zito’s fillings from inside, cuts of teeth looking less like a polite smile and more like ridges of naked bone. Zito’s pinky is bleeding, Mulder notices, stuck up at a tea-drinking angle, a slow bead of red rolling down towards Zito’s hand.
Mulder hopes the FSN guys are getting this. Zito’s just of fucking mess.
He’s victorious, though, crowing and spitting the shell on an arc, out of the dugout and into the grass. Zito’s way too good at spitting things. It’s a fucking strange talent to have.
Hudson throws another slider that masquerades beautifully as a split for impossibly long, and it fools Mulder and fools everybody. Mulder can only tell by the batter’s swing that the ball was not only low, but off the plate. Chavez is saying, “wow,” with his lips in a circle, exchanging loaded looks with Crosby.
Hudson doesn’t like the guys to talk behind him that much when he’s pitching. He gets tunnel-vision, and won’t answer questions in the dugout from anybody but his catcher or the pitching coach. Mulder learned to steer clear way early, when Hudson sprained Mulder’s finger back in 2000 for poking him in the side while Hudson was in the zone.
They had a drinking game once, where they collected twenty media articles about each player, and they would drink for every time the articles used the same few words to describe them
Hudson’s words were ‘intensity,’ ‘focused,’ ‘grit,’ ‘tough,’ and so on. Some of Zito’s were ‘artistic,’ ‘Zen,’ ‘fuchsia’ (though Zito protested that on the grounds that he hadn’t taken that pillow with him on road trips for three years-Mulder and Hudson said as long as it kept coming up in articles, he still had to drink for it), and any synonym or comparable of ‘tousled,’ just because Hudson couldn’t believe that Zito’s refusal to comb his hair was supposed to be a testimony to being free-spirited and hip, and meanwhile no one ever talked about the unimaginable simplicity of shaving your head and then not having to deal with it anymore.
Mulder doesn’t even remember his own words. They probably weren’t very complimentary. Hudson throws a bunch of fastballs, each one chipped off foul. Hudson pulls off his hat, swipes his forearms across his face and forehead. He’s always doing that, it’s part of his rhythm. Sometimes, when he does it right before the inning ends, he gets back to the dugout and Mulder can see how the sweat makes his black tattoos shine.
“What were my words?” Mulder blinks. He didn’t mean to say that. He keeps his eye on Huddy, just wanting to see one splitter, that’s all, just one swinging strike and the break so sharp the ball skips off the plate.
“Words for what?”
Mulder thinks about how it’s the same as it is with songs. Sometimes you only want to hear one song, and you’ll go nuts if you can’t. Your whole day will be ruined. That’s how he is, with pitches. Sometimes, he just needs to see Hudson’s splitter, like now. Like the past two weeks. Sometimes, he needs to see Zito’s curve.
Recently, it’s gotten worse. Since he started dreaming about it. Recently, it’s gotten kinda unsettling.
He’ll sneak out to the end of the dugout when Zito’s taking his bullpen session, spy until Zito breaks off a good one and Mulder feels it all the way through him, tips of his fingers and soles of his feet, shivering.
Mulder is worrying about whether normal people get all fuckin’ shivery and buzzed from good breaking stuff, but then Zito’s talking.
“Words, man, were you going somewhere with that?”
Mulder starts to tear up another cup. He debates whether it would be funny or creepy to turn and make eye contact, say very solemnly, “Zito, I . . . I think I’m in love. With . . . your curve.”
Creepy. Definitely creepy.
“That drinking game we used to play? While ago. With, like, the articles, and the words they used.”
“Right right right,” Zito says quickly, bobbing his head. “Dude, what were your words? That’s a good question.” He props his elbow on his knee, chin in hand, his back curved. He’s a statue, but Mulder forgets the name. It’s pretty famous too.
Mulder breathes out. Baseball is making him stupider. All he ever thinks about anymore is his mechanics, and pitch selection, and the weird loose grip Zito uses on his change-up, stuff like that.
“One of them was ‘confident,’” Zito tells him, face still intent, looking older than he normally does. He sucks the blood off his pinky. He must have chewed through a vein or something, for it not to have clotted yet.
Mulder winces at Zito licking blood off his finger, shamelessly, and turns back to the field.
Something pretty strange is happening to him, lately. Something. Really fucking odd.
Mulder rubs his palm on his pants, clearing his throat. “Um. Wasn’t it. Did we say ‘tall’ was one of them?”
Zito shakes his head, mumbling from around his fingers, “No, ‘cause that was in, like, every single article. And, you know. The alcohol poisoning. Not so much fun.”
“‘Laidback!’” Mulder says too loudly, triggered for whatever reason by Zito saying ‘fun,’ and Harden yells something back, but Mulder doesn’t bother paying attention, and Zito’s nodding.
“Totally right, man. Though, like, I kinda take issue with that. You know, ‘cause. I’ve seen how you organize your dresser. You keep your white athletic socks separate from your black dress socks like one of them’s got cooties or something. It’s, like, disturbed. And not laidback at all.”
Zito grins at him, look how funny and endearing I am, and Mulder finds himself looking for red on Zito’s teeth. He doesn’t see any, though. He moves his shoulders in an uncomfortable aborted shrug.
“You, like. Your dresser is basically your desk. Your closet is the floor.”
“’s convenient,” Zito muffles, still sucking his pinky and Mulder thinking about copper or iron or silver, something. The smell of fog down near the shore.
He hasn’t been watching Hudson. He probably missed like ten splitters. He sags back against the bench, arms crossed over his chest. “You’re so fucking lazy I could cry,” Mulder says, letting his upper lip curl because he loves doing that, it’s Elvis-cool.
It does make him look even more like an asshole than he usually does, though. But, well. Nothing without a price.
Mulder’s watching Hudson, but he’d bet his Xbox that Zito’s looking at him with that demandingly hurt expression on his face, i-hate-you-so-make-it-better-right-now-or-i’ll-scream. Mulder’s ninety-nine percent sure that Zito has held his breath until he’s passed out as a bargaining tactic at least once in his life. Maybe eighty-five percent sure that Zito’s done it in the last decade.
Because, you know, stick with what works.
Mulder doesn’t look at him. There’s not much Zito likes more than being the object of someone’s sympathy or goodwill. There’s no such thing as a minor wound in Barry Zito’s life. Everything’s a tragedy and he always needs someone to help him get it fixed, be it broken sunglasses, or a hole in his lucky socks, or the time he showed up in Scottsdale with a hard grin on his face and his car broken down twelve miles away (“I got a ride with this family and there were these two little boys and also a puppy named Pope Pius XIII, it was totally crazy”), Zito elated because it’d been so long since he’d needed a place to crash, been so long since he’d gotten to be a guest.
“I’m not lazy.” Zito’s voice is getting pinched and stupid-sounding the way it does when he’s upset. Mulder’s following Tim Hudson’s right hand, the ball like a piece of white flame.
‘Splitter, Tim, c’mon, please,’ Mulder thinks, wanting to shut his eyes for emphasis, but not wanting to miss it. Zito punches him on the shoulder.
“Hey! You wanna at least pretend to listen?” Poke. Mulder’s gonna be covered in tiny fingertip bruises tomorrow. He catches Zito’s hand to stop him and Zito says again, fervently, “I’m not fucking lazy, dude.” Mulder lets his hand go, because it’s not like they can just hang out in the dugout holding hands.
“Jesus, you’re still talking about that?” Mulder answers without looking over. Mulder tenses as Hudson’s arm comes down-change-up. He sits back in disappointment. This is so fucking warped.
Zito, apparently not up to his normal standard of being annoying, hits him again. Mulder spins and socks him in the chest, a move which every little brother should know how to block. But then, Mulder’s the oldest of three boys, so he never really had to take too many punches, and Zito’s got sisters, which is probably why people keep saying he’s ‘sensitive’ like it’s a goddamn compliment or something.
Zito’s hands are flat on his chest and he’s gasping, wheezing, eyes bulging. Mulder rolls his eyes. “Give me a fucking break.”
Zito shoots him death-glare. Zito’s got a surprisingly good death-glare. It’s because it’s so unexpected, the way Zito can make his face go completely still and widen his eyes just a bit so that the white shows in a circle. He still looks like a sensitive emo-obsessed boy from suburbia, but when Zito busts out the death-glare, he also looks decidedly insane, kind of like a good-looking wolf.
Mulder remembers that look from his dream. Which he is not thinking about. Zito’s death-glare zeroed in from the mound to the plate. The clarity of it, just like how he remembers Hudson’s tattoos in the dream, intricately detailed and gleaming as black as oil.
But of course, Mulder’s not thinking about those fucking dreams.
“Can’t. Breathe,” Zito whistles, looking like he belongs in a comic strip. Blood drips off Zito’s finger and pats silently on the concrete. Mulder grimaces again.
“First of all, if you can talk, you can breathe. Second of all, I didn’t know they still made pussies in your size. And third, you’re fucking bleeding all over everything and if you get it on my spikes I’ll kick your ass. Here.”
Mulder circles his fingers around Zito’s wrist, lifts both their hands above their heads. He considers for a second how unimaginably stupid they must look, but Zito’s just blinking at him curiously now, not whining or staging his own death anymore, for which Mulder is thankful.
“Above your heart, dude. It’s, like, the most basic of all first-aid.” Zito nods thoughtfully. Mulder shifts. There’s no reason why Zito can’t just hold up his own hand without any help. No reason for Mulder’s fingers sliding along the underside of Zito’s wrist, his thumb mapping the bones on the side.
Zito keeps looking at him expectantly, so Mulder looks back towards the field. With Zito’s wrist in his hand, his arm going numb and his face flushing, Mulder almost misses it, but then there’s the snap and the kamikaze fall, a Tim Hudson splitter, so hard Mulder can almost hear wood cracking somewhere, can feel every inch of his skin burr, and slow heat low in his stomach.
Mulder drops Zito’s wrist like it’s hot, scooting away down the bench clumsily and knocking someone’s Gatorade cup castle to the ground. He clasps his hands tightly together, fingers interlocked, and forces his eyes to stay on Scott Hatteberg, on the first base coach, on a fan in the stands enjoying his free country by exposing his swollen hairy belly to the god-fearing women and children who just wanted to see a ballgame.
Mulder doesn’t not let himself watch Hudson pitch, doesn’t move when Zito comes sliding after him. Mulder’s face feels about the color of a brick. This is the most fucked up thing that has ever happened to him, ever.
He closes his eyes, and the dream plays out, Zito glaring and looking like he’s about to part his lips and show off his fangs, and then Zito goes through his motion and pitches, a curveball that oughta get taught in calculus classes.
Mulder makes a tiny whimpering sound, bowing his head and Tim Hudson rises up behind his eyes, leaning in with his arm hanging loosely and his mouth cocked open as he gets the signs. Dream-Hudson is in the cleanest white home uniform ever, his fierce whipping delivery and a splitter that leaves threads of the sound barrier in its wake. Hudson grinning, cocky and angling his chin up, a challenge.
Cannot believe this is happening.
Mulder sits back, keeping his hands carefully together, folded low on his stomach. He works on breathing it away. Getting hard in uniform pants is just the worst idea ever. Oh wait no.
Getting hard because of really fucking good breaking pitches is the worst idea ever.
Covering up his face, vaguely aware that Zito is bouncing around impatiently next to him, torn with curiosity, Mulder mutters into his palms, “I swear to God I didn’t used to be this fucked up.”
How can he be getting turned on by pitches? Hudson’s split, Zito’s curve . . . sometimes, if he went to bed sorta drunk, the purity of Rich Harden’s fastball, but then he feels guilty afterwards, and what the fuck, honestly, what kind of shit is this for him to have to deal with?
Zito’s jabbing him in the shoulder over and over again. “Dude, what is going on, you have to tell me. Duuuuude.”
Mulder smacks his hand away, shoves Zito a bit. He’s getting under control. Slowly. God, he never thought it’d happen in the dugout. Thought it was just a dream thing, weird shit happens in dreams all the time, wouldn’t be a dream without it.
But, no. In the middle of the fucking day? In the middle of the game, in the middle of the dugout, in the middle of the twenty-five thousand fans who came to see Hudson’s splitter because it’s the nastiest out-pitch this side of, well, of Zito, but nobody came because they find the split to be fucking hot.
Mulder leans back gingerly. His head hurts. He sneaks a look and Zito is still jittering impatiently, and now he’s got a baseball in his hand. Mulder looks away. Not what he needs right now, not the deuce and how when they were in San Francisco in June for interleague, Felipe Alou came up and asked in his accented philosopher’s voice if Zito had been cursed or blessed for that curve, was it good magic or bad?
All three of them were there, and they laughed, sure Felipe was joking around, but Felipe didn’t really laugh with them and neither did Zito and Mulder would wonder about that if he wondered about stuff like that.
Which he does not, because who puts that much time and attention into someone else’s pitches or someone else’s magic or whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t help the fact that Mulder has apparently wants to fuck Zito’s curveball.
And Hudson’s splitter.
At the same time.
Mulder chokes, on nothing at all. Zito whacks him on the back, but Mulder pulls away. He doesn’t trust anything, at this point. Zito’s the one who throws the curve-maybe Mulder will get mixed up. Or, well, maybe his dick will get mixed up. Mixed up more than already, that is. Because, really, like, the fur coat fantasy was one thing, more embarrassing than fucked up, but no big deal. But this is just. Fucking absurd.
Zito’s looking at him, wide eyes tinted with concern, but Zito can turn that on and off like a faucet. “Dude, you look, like. Bad. Crazy.”
“Two points,” Mulder mutters. Both bad and crazy, that sounds about right.
Zito’s mouth opens, but then the inning ends and here comes Hudson and of course he’s going to want to sit on Mulder’s other side, of course Huddy will be thrilled that Mulder and Zito are acting like friends again.
Hudson plops right down, big ole wedge of a grin on his face. “Boys,” he says, making his voice much deeper than usual. “I do believe that the splitter-” Hudson stops, closes his eyes as if the emotion is just. Too. Much. Mulder’s hands are fisted and digging into the bench, just from hearing Hudson say ‘splitter.’
‘So fucked up, so fucked up,’ Mulder chants.
“The splitter,” Hudson continues solemnly. “Has found its way home.” Hudson’s grin comes back, clapping Mulder on the shoulder. Mulder smiles weakly, wishes they were at a bar so he could drink until he couldn’t remember anything.
“Yeah, man, we saw,” Zito says, leaning forward past Mulder to talk to Hudson. “Looked fucking incredible, man, good as I’ve seen you throw it in a long time.”
Mulder shuts his eyes. What the fuck did he do to deserve this? What kind of dirty fucking joke is this, and who can call it off?
The splitter rakes low through his head. The curve starts way up above his eyes and bombs into his mouth. Mulder imagines the taste of white leather, hard red stitches. His mind swims, twisting his stomach, and if he passes out, here in front of everyone and on fucking television, if he passes out, he’s gonna have to move to another country. Someplace without baseball. No splitters. No curveballs. Mulder panics briefly upon realizing that the only marketable skill he has is pitching, but then realizes his head is clearer and he’s not gonna pass out, not gonna have to flee the country.
Zito and Hudson are talking animatedly around him, their hands flickering and making Mulder dizzy. His eyes focus in on Zito’s hand jerking cleanly down, wrist flicked and thumb pressed up on the invisible ball.
‘He’s showing Huddy the curve,’ Mulder thinks in disbelief, and then Hudson says, “Yeah, kid, but take a look, awright, this is what I’ve been doing, trying to get it back and all.”
Mulder risks a glance at Hudson, and Hudson’s showing Zito the splitter, quick graceful hand and Zito with his good/bad magic. Mulder loses sensation in his extremities. He knows he’s blushing, face and neck and probably upper body too, as happens in severe cases. But that’s the least of his problems, because it’s happening again, for christ’s sake, again, after he just got himself under control five minutes ago, can’t a guy get a break.
Mulder stands jerkily. Hudson and Zito both stop talking and look up at him in surprise. Mulder makes a sound that’s all consonants, yanking his head towards the clubhouse door. He manages to keep from sprinting, walking calmly and trying not to feel the weight of Hudson and Zito’s eyes on his back. His hands are shaking. He’s half-hard and it’s incredibly uncomfortable and worse by the minute. God, he could be on television right now. Mulder hates his job.
He gets to the clubhouse and forbids himself from going to the stalls and jerking off, because he just, he really doesn’t want to be that guy. He paces around and flips short-temperedly through the newspapers on the tables. He listens to half a song on Chavez’s iPod which is just out on the stool in front of his locker, because Chavez is the trusting sort and also stupid.
Mulder is trying very hard not to think about it. Thinking about it isn’t gonna fix anything. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s not like he can reasonably debate the topic or something.
God. Breaking stuff. Or, specifically, Tim Hudson’s and Barry Zito’s breaking stuff. Because Mulder used to watch old black-and-white footage on Channel 6 really late at night, of Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson, and he’s seen tape of Vida and Dave Stewart and Eck since he’s been out here, Mulder has dedicated his life to pitching and he’s seen stuff that pushes something off a cliff in his chest, shines his eyes, quickens his pulse.
But all that tape, all that footage, the trillions upon trillions of pitches he’s watched, and never before-never before.
Mulder swipes his hands through his hair. The tabletop is pale blonde wood and waxed so aggressively there’s a fuzzy Mulder-shaped outline, and he can pick out his eyes, way back in their sockets, the line of his nose, his fingers fiddling with the top button of his jersey, an old nervous habit from, like, fucking high school.
Mulder snatches his hand down, pins it to the table. “I’m not going crazy,” he whispers, and he’s not really talking to himself because he’s barely making any noise. “It’ll pass. It’ll go away. No way this lasts. No way.”
He watches himself nodding in the tabletop. He tries to relax, but the bottom’s dropping out, and physics teachers are shuddering at the fall, small kids are slack-mouthed and old baseball guys sigh contentedly, and Hudson and Zito are standing in the sun, grinning at him, gloves on and white balls on the grass, lying in wait.
The splitter, the curve. Zito’s leg-kick, Hudson’s injurious torso twist, Zito taking a day and a half to go through his motion and Hudson moving too quickly to see anything but angle. Left arm, right arm, one pitch starts at eye-level, the other looks fat between the belt and the knees.
The curve plummets, an elevator car with the cables cut, agonizingly slow all the way down, a nice long look of the prettiest breaking pitch Mulder’s ever seen. And the split, the split just disappears. Blink and it’s gone. Keep your eyes open, it’s gone anyway. Turns up in Tim Hudson’s back pocket. Evil ripping switchblade of a pitch.
And Hudson and Zito, still grinning, hips cocked and all washed by the sun.
Mulder lowers his head on the table. He’s not attracted to anything or anybody on this goddamn team. He’s not attracted to a splitter and a curve because that’s IMPOSSIBLE.
And he’s not attracted to a splitter-pitcher or a slow teasing curveball-pitcher, either, because that’s actually more fucked up than getting turned on by their fucking signature pitches.
Mulder keeps his head down, counts to five hundred in his head very slowly to keep from thinking. Then he straightens, speculative.
Mulder’s already gotten himself fucked up, somehow. That horse has definitely left the barn. So all he’s got to be careful of is not fucking up anybody else. Well. Anybody who doesn’t deserve it. That’s all he’s got to do.
Standing, Mulder unbuckles his belt, slips a hand in for a second, just to check, make sure everything’s cool. And everything is. He goes to the video room and finds Huddy’s five-hit complete-game shutout against Baltimore, when the splitter looked like some kind of divine retribution, and Hudson cruised and didn’t crack a smile until the last out, when he leapt on Mulder’s back like an overly-affectionate jungle animal.
Mulder smiles, and goes to the other end of the room, the older games. He finds Zito’s twentieth win from 2002, right after the streak ended, but Mulder had never seen Zito throw his curve better than he did during that long August-September when they all walked around waiting to be woken up. Zito’s curve, Mulder could have told Alou, it’s good and bad magic both. It’s whatever Zito wants it to be.
Mulder steals a pocket-pack of Kleenex from Crosby’s locker, and takes the two boxes into one of the monitor rooms. He locks the door, pushes a hand through his hair, and unbuttons his jersey, gets his pants open and pops in Hudson’s shutout.
There’s no doubt about it, now. Mulder’s a sick little puppy and maybe he should care about that, but the splitter, man, which Hudson thinks he’s found again, at last. Zito keeps misplacing the curve, done it at least five times that Mulder can think of right off the top of his head, but it always comes back to him. When Zito gets traded, his curveball will track him down all the way across the country, and they’ll write human interests stories about it: ‘Courageous Curveball Home At Last After 3000 Mile Journey.’ Maybe a Disney movie. Celebrity voice for the curveball.
This is all fine. Mulder’s already crazy. So, whatever.
Mulder stops, rips his watch off with his teeth and drops it on the floor, and shifts in the chair, angling his weight against the arm. He watches Hudson for awhile without moving his hand. He hisses through his teeth at the straight pitches, at Huddy’s slider. Just the split, please, all the time, until forever.
Hudson finds his groove and starts to look like a machine but not really. Mulder watches rhythm flow into him, and soon half the pitches are splitters, fantastic vanishing split-fingered fastballs, and Mulder’s own rhythm speeds up, biting down on the collar of his jersey and doing his best to keep quiet.
And Hudson strikes out the side and Mulder is breathing fast and shallow, hunched over with his head bent. And at this moment, close enough that he can feel it building up in his teeth, at this moment Mulder is not thinking about his two used-to-be-friends or what kind of perfect catastrophes the three of them could bring down upon each other. He’s not thinking about being crazy or fucked up or how unbearably wrong this all is.
Right now Mulder is very close to being happy, and he knows better than to be greedy, at a time like this. All he really wants is a second monitor so he can see Zito and Hudson at the same time, see the splitter and the curve race each other to the plate, see the splitter win every time, feel the swandive of the curve all the way from his heart to his stomach.
Then he’ll be so set, and he’ll never want anything else ever again.
THE END